Saving A Vanishing Horse

Come and listen to our Host, Joyce Benning, as she chats with today's guest, Kimberlee Campbell, for our “End of Year, Beginning of Me” Podcast Series.
A powerfully themed mini-series helping women close the year with clarity and step into the next one with grounded self-love and vision.

Kimberlee Campbell, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Grey Raven Ranch, a Canadian federal non-profit dedicated to preserving the Ojibwe Horse and educating the public about this Anishinaabe heritage breed. At Grey Raven, she focuses on breeding for healthy future generations and providing training for the ranch’s horses.

A retired professor of Romance Languages, Dr. Campbell continues to teach at the Harvard Extension School. She also collaborates with Indigenous communities in Lakota country, creating classroom materials for Lakota language instruction and supporting teachers in developing their teaching repertories.

She is the author of five books and numerous articles on both medieval literature and Indigenous language pedagogy. Her teaching has been recognized with the Mensa Foundation’s Distinguished Teacher Award (2004) and Harvard’s Carmen S. Bonanno Excellence in Foreign Language Teaching Award (2014).

She lives on Seine River First Nation in northwestern Ontario with her partner and Grey Raven co-founder, Darcy Whitecrow.

We trace the near extinction and revival of the Ojibwe horse, from a runaway mare and a heartbreaking loss to a grassroots rescue across winter ice and a ranch built on granite and grit. Kim shares how science, Indigenous knowledge, and a network of women keep a rare breed alive and gentle.

• Origins and traits of the Ojibwe horse
• Anishinaabe partnership and winter work
• Colonial policies and loss of mobility
• Parks, poverty, and engines accelerating decline
• The rescue of the last four mares
• Cross-border stewardship and ranch creation
• Genetics, e-clade DNA, and outcross strategy
• Temperament suited for kids and elders
• Women-led network sustaining the breed
• An invitation to start anew through conservation

For more Divas That Care Network Episodes visit www.divasthatcare.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:35 A Lost Mare And A Discovery
• 5:20 Who The Ojibwe Horses Are
• 12:10 Symbiosis With The Anishinaabe
• 19:10 Near Extinction And Causes
• 26:15 The Daring Rescue Of Four Mares

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

It's Divas The Care Radio. Stories, strategies, and ideas to inspire positive change. Welcome to Divas That Cares, a network of women committed to making our world a better place for everyone. This is a global movement for women by women engaged in a collaborative effort to create a better world for future generations. To find out more about the movement, visit divas that care.com after the show. Right now, though, stay tuned for another jolt of inspiration.

SPEAKER_02: 0:31

Hello to all. Welcome to Divas That Care Network. I am Joyce Banning, and I will be your host for this magical robust lifestyle show. I am so excited today, as I have with me Kim Campbell of the Grey Raven Ranch. And her and I are not only going to talk about the ranch, but about Ojibwe horses. And oh, it will be a magical show as we are doing this podcast for Divas I Care for End of the Year and Beginning of Me. So with that, Kim, could you please do a brief introduction of yourself and then just let's just start sharing what you would like to share about how you feel the beginning of me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21

Okay. Well, first of all, Joyce, I want to thank you for inviting me to speak to you and to speak to whoever will be listening to this. This is fabulous, and I'm very excited about the about your project, but also about ours. So who I am, uh, let's see. I am a retired professor of romance languages. Uh, I still teach one class for Harvard University, where I retired um a few years back. And uh basically I I um got into working, I've been working with horses all of my life, but I got into the subject of today, Ojibwe horses, um, in a very uh peculiar way years ago, in that I lost my uh Tennessee Walker mayor, who I was hand walking at a new barn at a new facility, and she broke free of me. Nobody warned me that there was a bear in the woods. And it's both a sad and a happy story. Uh, she broke free and took off running. Uh, her name was free, in fact, and she ran and ran and ran and ran about uh actually a long way, about five miles through a swamp. And what I ended up doing to find her was that I took airplanes. It was International Falls, Fort Francis, Ontario, that area. So right on the Canadian border, I took, uh I hired airplanes to take me up and look for her. And I finally thought I spotted her at a farm that, as I say, was five or more miles away from the farm where she had bolted from the bear. And so I kind of marked the area on a map and then I went looking for her on the ground. The sad part of this story is that while we did see her, um, nobody ever spotted her in enough time for me to get there because I lived about an hour away and get a lead line on her. And sadly, she was shot. Um, miss somebody mistook her for a moose in November. And we never managed to get her back. But the farm that she went to, and this is the happy and kind of magical part, was a farm that had a large number at that time of Ojibwe horses. So they had about 25 Ojibwe horses, and those are the horses that she went to and was hanging outside of their pasture. Uh, and so that is how when I drove up to this farm and introduced myself and said, You'll never believe this story. I have a horse that that bolted from a bear, and she's outside of your fence. And if you could keep an eye out for her and maybe get a lead line on her if you can. Again, the sad story is that we never did. But then I said, What kind of horses are these? And the owner of the farm said, Well, these are Ojibwe horses. And I said, Never heard of them because I had never heard of this particular horse breed. Now, to give those of you who were um horse fans in the crowd uh an idea of what this horse is, this horse belonged to, and there are a number of names for the Ojibwe tribe. The Ojibwe, the Chippewa, the Odawa. It's it's basically all the same tribe. Uh, they have different names depending on how far west you go. So it's one of the largest uh tribes in North America, and it's also one of those that has a large number of speakers of the language, which is Anishna Bemoan. And there, the people call themselves the Anishina Bay. Now, we call the horses Ojibwe, which is one of the admittedly colonialized names for the people, but it's one that more people recognize. So we have stuck with Ojibwe horses for the name for the horse, although the people themselves are the Anishina Bay, uh, which means the people, right? They they call themselves the people. So um basically I met these horses and they're a little bit smaller. They're a woods horse, they're a creature of the boreal forest and the Canadian Shield. So they stand about 13 hands to 14 hands. They come in black and also in the in done factor color. So they're Gruya horses, or they'll be red done. Uh, we there are a few bays. They there are no white ones or gray ones or cremo or or palomino, any of the lighter colors, that's a no. They never were that color. Uh, they can have white marks, and what we usually get is a star or a star and a snip on the face, and then a sock or uh a coronet band on one or both back feet, no socks on the front feet. So they have a very specific uh DNA pattern, right? Um right now, today, this is a very rare breed, and I had never heard of them before because there are fewer than 200 animals worldwide still left alive. So it is a very small, very small, very rare breed, but of a breed that lived symbiotically with the Anishinaabe people for what the elders will say, uh thousands of years, right? The elders say the horses were always here. And in fact, there are uh cave um uh drawings in our area of horses in caves, right? So we know that these horses go back a long way, partnering with the people. And here's what the interesting, interesting part, and I'll jump around a little bit and then come back to more recent history. But uh the horses, when I say they live symbiotically, the people would let them go in the summer and they would forage for themselves. And they're very, very attuned to people. They want to be close to their people, and so they were just very easy to gather up come wintertime. And the horses also knew that they would get food provided for them by the Anishinaabe people in the winter. So they were willing to come in, and there is almost an unspoken deal. Yes, we'll pull your sleds and you can ride us and we'll tow things for you and pull things for you, and you will feed us in the wintertime. Now, why the winter and not the summer? Because in the summer, the Anishinaabe, this is the people of the lakes, they had the water to move around on canoes with, right? So that they didn't need to be riding the horses or having the horses pulling a wagon or some kind of a travois in the summer. They needed this when there was snow on the ground and everything was frozen. So this worked out particularly well for both the horses and for the people. And as I say, they live symbiotically for what the elders tell us, um, uh, is forever, basically, thousands of years. Now, the horse, uh, the the first thing I said was, well, no, you know, horses came from Europe and you know, they were originally a North American animal, but they died out in the ice age. Uh, right now, there's a lot of speculation about whether, in fact, some horses may have survived, and these would be the horses, uh, because of their relationship with human beings. Now, we're not very far where I live now from where the bottom of the ice was. The bottom of the ice was around Minneapolis for people who live in my state, which is Minnesota, right? And it's not very far. It's it's two or three hundred miles north. So it's within a couple of days' ride for a fast horse, a three days' ride. So the idea that the people who lived here then were moving with their animals is not so terribly far-fetched. And uh, so it's very interesting when you listen to the elders and listen to those indigenous ways of knowing the world and then compare with what we have. What we do have, and uh a fairly well-known horse geneticist Gus Cawthron also studied the Ojibwe horses and kind of mapped their DNA, and everybody says, oh, well, they must be Canadian horses, or they must be, and actually, no, they're pretty far apart from Canadian horses. They were not particularly Mustangy or Spanish either. Uh, so the interesting thing is, what are these horses genetically? And Gus Cothrin's studies showed us that they're a very homogeneous group of horses. So this is a clear separate breed. This is not an offshoot of Canadians, this is not an offshoot of Spanish horses, this is its own breed, per Gus's studies. And then later studies on mitochondrial DNA, for those who are interested in this, show us that these horses are eclade DNA, mitochondrial DNA, so the maternal DNA. And this means that they're very rare. They are not that closely related to most of our domestic breeds. So this is what gives us the idea that maybe the elders have a point. And those of us who work with these horses and see how attached they are to people and how willingly there's no catching these horses. You the the question is, do you get mobbed by all of them or one at a time? Uh so they're they're just they see you and they run up to you, right? That that is just the way this breed is. So uh the idea is, of course, that the horses that came in in the winter willingly and allowed themselves to be fed by the people are the ones that would have survived. The ones that were more resistant to being fed by people would have been the ones that didn't survive and pass on their DNA. So, what we imagine is that over time, that the horses that were most attached to human beings or most willing to live amongst them would be the horses that survived and passed on their DNA, which is why we have this wonderful breed of horses that is in fact very attached to the human beings that are in their immediate circle. But they're also curious about all human beings, right? They're just, they're very people curious. So, question is what happened to these horses? And what happened to them, in fact, is that they went in the 1970s, and this is people always want to know why did they disappear? Because they almost disappeared. This is a survival story. Uh and they almost disappeared for many, many reasons, one of which is colonialization. Uh, one of the stated purposes, and I know the Canadian story less than the US, but one of the stated purposes of the U.S. government was to remove transportation from the people that it wanted to place on reservations and have them stay there. Now in Canada, uh, just an aside for indigenous populations there, they had to actually have a permission slip, an actual written permission slip to leave the reservation. And this was as late as the 1970s. So the uh one of the reasons their horses disappeared, obviously, is because of reservations and colonialization. But there are other reasons. Building national parks is wonderful, but because people read this horse as an invasive species and not and did not read horses as native as they are to North America, since horses originated 50 million years ago in North America, uh, they read them as invasive and therefore got rid of a lot more of them. When they were building up in our area, we have Voyagers National Park, we have the boundary waters on the Minnesota side, Quetico Provincial Park on the Canadian side. We are just a sea of parkland up here. And that did away with a lot of the horses because they wanted them out of the parks. Another reason is that people, people uh that had them were poor. And one thing you can do with horses is sell them for slaughter to be made into dog food and what have you. And we think a lot of these horses were sold when people had to pick between their horses and their children eating. They picked their children, obviously. So a lot of these horses we know were sold for slaughter. And so that's another way that they disappeared. There have been massive fires over time in this area, which probably did in other horses. Um then the internal combustion engine was kind of the last nail in the coffin because when the tribes, the the um Anishna Bay, different tribes and bands, especially in our area, got particularly snowmobiles because they still didn't have roads, but they got snowmobiles for winter transport. And that again was started in the 1960s and the late 60s. The symbiotic relationship between the horses and the people broke down. And so they stopped taking care of the horses as systematically in the winter because they had another means of transportation. That was another reason why more and more horses uh were not being were not being bred and were not being kept uh in good enough flesh for them to survive our minus 40 winters up here with very deep snow. So in the end, in the 1970s, these horses went down to four mayors only. So this is this is an enormous survival tale. There were only four mayors left. The last stallion was shot by mayor free, ironically, was shot because somebody thought that stallion was a moose. And horses and moose, I've mistaken moose for horses a lot of times, so I can see how the reverse happens. Uh, horses and moose look a lot alike if you look at them from the back. So you would think a very large horse when you look at the back of a young moose. And vice versa. Of course, they would think a small moose just right for the pot, uh, unfortunately, when they look at a horse. So they shot the last stallion, and now they only had four mayors, and the park was just getting started, and they were going to euthanize the last four mayors. And what happened is the Anishina Bay bands from the U.S. side of the border got together with uh some Finnish farmers who lived up near the border and said, we'll smuggle them across, we'll save those last four. So they did. And it's it's quite a lovely story. They they had to chase them around a little bit because two were not that used to people, two were more used, but they got them into trailers and they literally drove them across the frozen lake uh at a a shallow, a narrow spot to get them to Minnesota, and then they were near the what's called the Boys Fort Reservation, where they had been wild, but they had already gone extinct there. So this was the last four. They were at Red Lake First Nation. Um, sorry, it's not First Nation in the U.S. I get my Canadian and my U.S. scrambled a bit, but uh, which is also on the U.S. side, right, which is up in northern Minnesota. But the Boys Fort is where they came back after they smuggled those four mayors across. And then they said, these are wonderful horses. Should we just let them die out, just live out their lives and then pass from uh existence? And they decided no. Well, at the time, because DNA wasn't a thing, they didn't realize they weren't Spanish Mustangs. They thought somehow these are Spanish Mustangs that just got all the way up north here and lived with the Anishinaabe people for all that time, but they're really Spanish Mustangs. Well, it turns out they weren't, but to save them, they bred them with Smokey, Spanish Mustang Registry 169, who was very similarly conformed to the Ojibwe horses. So they bred the four mayors to Smokey and then line bred some of the fillies, some of the babies, and eventually the herd started to grow. And in the early 2000s, um, Rare Breeds Canada, which has since changed its name, it was listed as one of the rarest horses or the rarest horse on the Canadian side. They decided to bring some back across because they were by then they were not extinct anymore on the U.S. side, but now they're extinct in Canada. So the Canadians decided to bring some back, and that was fortuitous because everybody who had been working with them on the U.S. side was getting older and couldn't afford to keep them and the herd was getting too big and so forth. So the Canadians brought them back again just in time. And the miraculous part about these horses as survivors is that somebody always seems to step up when there really is a danger that they're going to be, they're going to be extinct, right? So uh basically they brought them back to Canada in about 2001, and it was about 2010 when I ran, when my horse ran to, my horse free ran to the Ojibwe horses at this particular farm, and I got acquainted with them. And it was two or three more years before we got our act together to get a grant going and to start Grey Raven Ranch, and it's G-R-E-Y, Raven Ranch, um, Gray Raven Ranch at Seine River First Nation, which is where I live with my partner, Darcy Whitecrow. And we worked with our children and other people's children, and we literally uh we don't have a place to put fence in the ground. We live on granite rock. So we wrapped the fencing through the trees, we wrapped highway underlayment uh through and around the trees and tied it with wire ties, and uh basically just created, we used sticks and unbarked logs to create a round pen and again wrapped it around the trees and uh uh basically started Gray Raven Ranch in about 2013. Wow. And so we've been at this now for 12 years officially, and we started with grant money, we got a small population and started breeding. So we've had a few of these go through Gray Raven right now. Um my partner and I are getting a little bit older, and so we don't have quite as many horses with us, but we have a lot of satellite foster programs that have our horses that are keeping maybe a breeding pair for us or a mare that's in full and what have you. So we have been also seeding our horses as we go because we know I'm 70 years old, we can't go on forever, although I have a pregnant mare this year for next year, and I'll get into that in a minute. But uh, we know that we can't go on forever. So we are also trying to make sure that there is follow-up to what we're doing. And there are not a huge number of breeders, but there are, let me see, one, there's us, there's Matahoke in Canada, uh, there's Hannah out in Alberta, uh Carolyn in Thunder Bay, Gwen in Winnipeg. That's about it for Canada, and then one breeder, and I'm kind of both sides of the border in the U.S. So there's only we're only talking about six or seven breeding farms right now for these horses. But we keep trying to add people. So if anybody's interested, I'd love to hear from you. Uh, we keep trying to add people who would be able to take a breeding pair, for example, or a mayor and foal, because we live in a vet desert where we are. But uh basically, what has also happened, and this is I'll get to my breeding story here, what has also happened with these horses, as you might imagine from a very small genetic pool, is that we have gotten very inbred. So I'm the person who does the inbreeding coefficients for everybody. I just keep a database and I and our inbreeding coefficients are way too high. We're into the teens for almost every cross I make. Every now and then I'll find a 10 or an 11. But we need, as geneticists have told us, we need outcross. So what uh Gray Raven did, and we did this a number of years ago, but then COVID got in the way because we're back and forth across the Canada-US border, uh, is that we got the most Spanish Mustang we could find, mostly because of Smoky, SMR169. Uh, and we are breeding to small sulfur mustangs to try and do some outcross so that we keep the genetics healthy. We know that that Spanish horse is in them now, like almost like every horse breed on the planet. They're a creation of human beings that put two or three breeds together like what they got and then tried to stabilize it, keeping those characteristics. So we know what we've got. We've got that very old thread of that old E-clay DNA plus smoky SMR 169. And so we're trying to add in a little bit more of the Spanish uh horse DNA with the sulfurs. And uh so I have a mayor pregnant for next spring, and then of course, our other stallion right now is in Winnipeg, and he has two other mayors pregnant for next spring. So we try for a baby or two every year. Next spring, if we're very, very lucky, we'll have three. Last spring we had one. We had uh we had a she is a bruiser of a girl. Her name is Dibekigizus, they all have Ojibwe names. Uh Anishna Be name, Dibeki Gizus is full moon, right? So uh her name is Full Moon because she was born on the full moon in April. Uh to a little mayor who's Nigigus, which means little otter girl, because she's seal brown. She's one of those that's not quite black, but almost. So uh basically we try for one or two babies a year, and uh hopefully we'll keep the breed going, but also keep the breed genetically healthy. So this is this is the project, and this is my, I should say, retirement project, right? This is uh what I've been doing in retirement, but also, and the interesting thing that I mentioned to Joyce is that a lot of the people who are foster ranches and that we work with now seeding are also women. So it's a wonderful network of women horse breeders, right? There's Gwen in Winnipeg, and there's Carolyn in Thunder Bay, and there's M in Wisconsin, and of course, there's me in both Minnesota and Ontario, and there's Trina in eastern Ontario, and there's Hannah out in Alberta. So we're all of us a group of women, uh, and it just that wasn't the plan. We were that was not what we were planning at all, and I shouldn't take anything away from my partner, Dar Darcy Whitecrow, obviously, but it's really been wonderful to have all of this wonderful group of women who are trying in very determined fashion to keep this breed going, right? And uh so I guess Joyce, I don't know what questions do you have or which direction should I go?

SPEAKER_02: 25:07

Oh, that was just that was just amazing. I loved every minute of it, and I love how you brought in at the end of what you were telling us is about the women, because knowing horses and being around them all my life, that says so much about the breed of the horse and their disposition and how they are for women to be able to come in and be part of that breeding, and the stallions have got to be just amazing on how they behave and their disposition, and I just I love that. We are coming down on getting close to having to close this great conversation, which I could talk to Kim for hours. We could go on and on about horses.

SPEAKER_00: 25:59

We could, but the stallions we can have we can have four-year-olds and have had around our stallions. These horses are so kind. My senior stallion, the one who just bred two mares, he'll be 18 next year. Um, he will just stand and lick my hand for hours and hours and hours, right? He's just he's so affectionate. We can have he's the horse that I trusted after a hip replacement to get on first. The first horse I got on was my stallion.

SPEAKER_02: 26:27

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 26:29

That's just how the breed is. We can have them around little kids. We do a program in Quetico Park every um Labor Day weekend, and they have hundreds of people. A lot of children are in there. We can have the children in the pen with the horses. They're all just the very first time, they're just fine. Our little mayor, uh my my own kids decided at one point, and I hadn't actually started this mayor. Oh, we need a little horse for these little kids. Let's use Nagyig. All she did, she'd never had anybody on her back before. Apparently, the kids said, Oh, what was the problem? All she did was look around and say, Oh, that's new and different. Okay. Just there was not an issue, right? They are so easy to work with. And from the stallions to the mayors, right? They're just really, really an easy-going, affectionate breed. So it's their personality we want them for. As much as they they look like horses, they don't look like ponies. You can't tell how big they are until you get some kind of clear size reference next to them, right? Uh, so they look like a horse, but they're a little bit smaller. As I say, the tallest ones are 14 hands, 14-1. And uh, as I say, they're just very people-oriented and very kind, and we love them for that as much as their striking good looks.

SPEAKER_02: 27:52

So that is just incredible, Kim. Oh, I just love that. And their disposition, I can just I can just picture all of that in my mind and what kind of a horse you are talking about, and that is just beautiful. And what a beautiful way to bring in to our listeners about the beginning of me. Like you said, this is part of your retirement with these horses, and expressing how women can get involved in this, and just by reaching out, any horse-loving women out there that have been looking for something like this. This is just amazing. Just absolutely amazing. What a beautiful, beautiful way to start a new year and a beginning of me with horses. Because horses are just they're amazing, amazing animals. They're just magical for me.

SPEAKER_00: 28:46

So well, it certainly was a new beginning for me because although I've been around horses all of my life, I had not even thought about running a non for endangered horses. Yeah. I mean, I was a professor of philology, which is endangered languages, and I still work on indigenous languages and different, but I had not thought about, I would not even have thought myself capable of running a nonprofit for endangered horses. Right. And so this is a project I started in retirement. So that that is one of the things that that I would say. It's good to start something new. Retiring is not the end, it's the beginning.

SPEAKER_02: 29:27

Exactly. Oh, I love that. That is just beautiful. And what a beautiful way this show has gone so quickly. And what a beautiful way to end that on what you just said, Kim. I want to thank you so very much for sharing from your heart about Grey Raven Ranch and the Ojibwa horses, Ojibwe horses, because I could totally tell you were talking from the heart. Every word you spoke was true love for these horses. And I just love it. Love that. I want to thank you so much, Kim, for all everything you are doing for these horses and for sharing it with here on Divas That Care.

SPEAKER_00: 30:11

Thank you so much, Joyce, for having me again.

SPEAKER_02: 30:14

You are so welcome. And with that, listeners, I want to thank you for tuning in to this magical show with Kim Campbell. And remember the Gray Raven Ranch, Ojibwe horses. And I want to wish all of you a very magical day and magical year to come. And with that, goodbye to all.

SPEAKER_01: 30:37

Thanks for listening. This show was brought to you by Divas That Care. Connect with us on Facebook, on Instagram, and of course on divas that care.com, where you can subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss a thing.